Something kind of hit me todayI looked at you and wondered if you saw things my way. . . We're taking it hard all the timeWhy don't we pass it by? David Bowie, “We Are the Dead”from Diamond Dogs, 1974 The first part of this post promised a superfecta; and I’m...
“If we can sparkle, he may land tonight….”David Bowie, “Starman”(from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972)Those readers who have followed this blog since it launched in 2007 may recall that it was originally a somewhat diaristic...
Ten years ago, when I learned of the existence of a film called Trona, shot in the desert hellhole of the same name, I feared the worst, especially when I learned that it was a thesis film by a CalArts graduate. It was hard to imagine anybody associated with that...
In “Her Story” you watch a handful of video clips of a staged interrogation. You then have the option to type in searches for key words—if you type the right words, you get more clips from the interrogation. If you do enough of the right searches and watch enough of...
The sculptures and videos in Same Rock are based on a “little Switzerland” in Appalachia, founded on the promise of its similarity to the Alps, and explore myths of universality, aesthetic deception, and the politics and economics of mountains. Please Enjoy… offers...
Last year I was invited to view a controversial painting that the owner claimed to be a genuine Rothko he bought at a small LA auction many years ago. The painting was not officially included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné despite the fact that the owner discovered...
Archiving cultural ephemera is a tricky business. Anyone who’s followed my writing for even a brief time will have encountered some kind of rant about how the institutional canonization of cultural insurrections like Punk, zine culture, hippies, beats, etc.,—or...
Long films aren’t new. As early as 1914, there was a film (The Photo-Drama of Creation) that ran eight hours. Wikipedia lists at least five films from that decade, which ran at least six hours. In 1971 Jacques Rivette made a famous 13-hour film (Out: One) that had one...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
ROCK AND ROLL IS FOR THE BIRDSDear Babs, What do you think about using live animals in an artwork? I recently went to a museum in Montreal and witnessed an entire exhibition of finches playing guitars! The air conditioning was blasting and I thought they needed little...
Stephen Cohen is the founder of photo l.a. and the Stephen Cohen Gallery, which is now the Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. In January the stalwart photo fair celebrates its 25th anniversary. Artillery: Why did you start photo l.a.? What made...
Happy New Year, dear reader(s). I know I was living up to the blog title just a bit excessively in the last month of this just past year; but I wasn’t just staying at home. First of all, there was Norma – the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Bellini’s classic tale of...
If there was a central flaw or fracture to Karen Finley’s The Jackie Look, it had mostly to do with a lack of clarity of its dramatic objective and trajectory. Finley seemed to be trying to both deconstruct an icon (or more precisely its refractions and reflections in...
There are probably as many words written about the ‘Jackie look’ by now as there are actual images documenting it. A quick scan of just a few of these images taken over the roughly 40 years of her public life reveals quite a range: the young equestrienne, the...
Art does not want us to look at art the way we are asked to look at art. Coming in, worried about making it in time to get to the next gallery and the next, anticipating dinner, standing, not knowing how long the video will go on, not knowing if the next gallery will...
In April I received a catalog for Sotheby’s May 2015 contemporary art auction with a cover image of a cardboard Coca-Cola crate embossed in gold leaf, an artwork created by Danish artist Danh Vo. This untitled 2011 work sold at that auction on May 13 for $466,000. I...
Joanne Heyler is the founding director of The Broad museum and director and chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation. She has been Eli Broad’s principal art advisor for the past 23 years.Artillery: Have you ever disagreed with a purchasing decision, or the final...
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